Teachers as Cultural Workers: Letters to Those Who Dare Teach

This last work from internationally respected educator Paulo Freire makes his ideas on education and social reform accessible to a broad audience of teachers, students, and parents. Freire shows how a teacher's success depends on observing individual students' approaches to learning and by the teacher's adapting teaching methods to students' learning methods. In Teachers as Cultural Workers, Freire speaks directly to teachers about the lessons learned from a lifetime of experience as an educator and social theorist.

Freire's words challenge all who teach to reflect critically on the meaning of the act of teaching as well as the meaning of learning. He shows why a teacher's success depends on a permanent commitment to learning and training, as part of an ongoing appraisal of classroom practice. By opening themselves to recognition of the different roads students take in order to learn, teachers will become involved in a continual reconstruction of their own paths of curiosity, opening the doors to habits of learning that will benefit everyone in the classroom.

In essays new to this edition, well-known and respected educators Peter McLaren, Joe Kincheloe, and Shirley Steinberg add their reflections on the relevance of Freire's work to the study and practice of education across the globe.